New site launches for narrative designers

A few months ago, Stephen Dinehart’s inner tech geek flashed on. Flexing mental muscles he hadn’t used since grad school, he set out to create The Narrative Designer’s Network, which officially launched Tuesday.

Sporting a slick front page and a pronounced audio intro, the Web site is a product of Narrware, an indie developer. Dinehart, creative director at the company, hopes the site will foster community among narrative designers, though he said it could also benefit gamers.

“We want to be inclusive,” said Dinehart, who was previously interviewed on GotGame. “It’s not something only for the lead narrative designer at Ubisoft.”

Core gamers can especially benefit from the Web site’s encyclopedia, he said. Though currently blank, he hopes the encyclopedia — a community wiki — will become a lexicon of critical terms players can use when discussing games.

The site will also indirectly affect gamers by encouraging discussion among developers. In addition to the encyclopedia, the site includes forums, a new e-publication, and Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. This means that narrative designers, given the opportunity to exchange ideas, will ultimately deliver more entertaining experiences.

“The only way any real arts or craft movement got started was through a group of passionate and dedicated peers,” Dinehart said, referring to artistic movements of the 60’s.

“How did that stuff happen?” he said. “It came from people sharing and discussing and spurring each other on in an effort to be better.”

The Web site is an evolution of the Narrative Design Exploratorium, an e-publication dedicated to exploring narrative design, otherwise known as interactive storytelling.

In the past, Dinehart spoke with art directors or combat engineers about narrative design. Though his coworkers had good ideas concerning the field, he said it was never enough.

“All too often I’ve found myself in that typical artist corner, if you will, when you’re working on the lunatic fringe of something, and I didn’t really have any peers to bounce my ideas off of,” he said.

In an effort to remedy this, he created the Narrative Design Exploratorium in March 2006. Through blog posts and interviews, he tried to create a sense of community among narrative designers. However, he felt the Exploratorium eventually reached a “peak of saturation.”

“I thought it would be best to create another space where people could help me define what narrative design is,” he said.

Though Dinehart is member of the International Game Developers Association and the Writers Guild of America, he said narrative design isn’t a large part of the discussion. To his knowledge, this site is the only place where discussion about narrative design is the primary focus.

“There’s certainly some people who will see it as laughable,” he said. “To some extent, those people or individuals will see that it’s not good for game developers to share information.”

However, for students or developers interested in learning about narrative design, the site can be a breeding ground for ideas.

“I would like to encourage those people to join up if they’re interested in the effort of evangelizing and evolving this craft,” he said.
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Images of The Narrative Design Network taken as screenshots from the Web site.
Photo courtesy of Stephen Dinehart.